W Polsce, czyli wszędzie Edwin Bendyk Polityka, 360pp, 2020 Has the COVID-19 pandemic taught us something about the future of the human condition? For sure, “The pandemic has reopened the debate about what is necessary and what is possible,” as Bruno Latour, the French philosopher of science, observed in a recent interview. What seems to…

Pandemic!: COVID-19 Shakes the World Slavoj Žižek Polity Press, 136 pp, 2020 Sadly, pandemics are nothing new. In his 1975 book “Discipline and Punish”, the French philosopher Michel Foucault used anecdotes from seventeenth-century French military archives in a lengthy discussion of how local governments reacted to the plague. Step one saw each town cut itself off…

We are currently experiencing a crisis similar to the one related to the depletion of natural resources—a crisis of exhaustion of meaning, wrote Georgi Gospodinov in his collection of essays Invisible Crises (2012). And as an alternative source of language energy, he proposed a sphere that deals with the constant production and renewal of meanings—literature.…

The initial recovery phase after the global financial crisis and the eurozone crisis was marked by a remarkable lack of new policy ideas. There is no need to repeat this experience. The current crisis is an opportunity to put the new policy ideas, that have come out of these debates, into practice. When the world…

As long as business profits, maximizing interests at any price, are accepted in the region, and especially in Hungary, the population will not be motivated to protest against issues the EU selects as—in its opinion—important ones. The different organizations of the EU have been criticizing Hungary for not following EU values. It was, however, never…

Maastricht was built on monetarism. But monetarism is a fiction—the fiction that there is a money supply that is controlled by an independent and purely technocratically managed central bank. This dream has nothing to do with reality. The ruling of the German Federal Constitutional Court of 5 May 2020 on the policies of the European Central Bank…

There has certainly never been an American president who cared more passionately about Central and Eastern Europe and did more to transform its geopolitical circumstances than Woodrow Wilson. With America‘s entry into World War One, declaring war against Germany in April 1917 and against Austria-Hungary in December, Wilson was keenly focused on Eastern Europe as…

More Austrians would agree that we should restore the Habsburg monarchy rather than unify with Germany — says Emil Brix in an interview with Zbigniew Rokita. ZBIGNIEW ROKITA: In your book Mitteleuropa Revisited you and Erhard Busek stressed: “Austria joined the EU in 1995 as the first Central European country”. Is that really how most…

Viktor Orbán clearly sees the erosion of the West, but it is unclear where the new ideas will come from. Can Central Europe reverse the historical dynamic of being the subaltern and instead be the role model for a renewal? In the midst of a crisis, it is hard to see the whole picture. We…

It is hard to imagine when and if the pandemic will be over. Just as the moment it came about caught us by surprise, the instance in which it may disappear is also hard to plan for. While the pandemic continues, the political perspectives may look different across the West. Wojciech Przybylski For Europe and for…

There is no global equilibrium, and cannot be at this stage: The process of changing the global order that we are dealing with is a dynamic and conflict-generating period, says Dmitri Trenin in an interview with Zbigniew Rokita. ZBIGNIEW ROKITA: A new world order often emerges from great crises. This was the case after WWI, WWII…

Lifelong learning is key to upskilling employees and entrepreneurs in order to maintain employment and create new jobs in a dynamically evolving global environment. It is important to enable people to adapt to a fast-changing jobs market to ensure they remain employable even in the face of advancing robotization and automation. Competitiveness on the job…

I was innocently travelling to see my grandparents, hearing about some obscure flu-esque wave sweeping into Europe, thinking “oh wow, the media are at it again”. Within 4 days, there was a national emergency, WHO declared pandemic status, and I was isolated in the Czech mountains with two grandparents, a dog and utter bewilderment. To…

In Central Europe, Covid-19 does not seem to have left a major imprint on people’s attitudes towards Europe; at least not yet. This could, however, easily change if, in the EU’s post-Covid-19 dynamic, the region drifts further away from the European center. Nothing New in the East For the moment, Poles, Hungarians, and Slovaks remain…

European differences are shelved—for now. The question is, will they come again to the forefront, as the crisis comes to an end?—asks Alexander Kriwoluzky, Head of the Department of Macroeconomics at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin, in an interview with Jakub Dymek JAKUB DYMEK: After the novel virus struck the world, when did…

Covid-19 revealed how brutal, unjust and inhumane the attitude to the old and sick is in the modern world. It showed the reality painstakingly concealed earlier behind thick curtains, hidden from the eyes of the majority. 1. The coronavirus has brought to the surface an entire range of situations and things that are normally invisible,…

In Taiwan, I had a chance to see what really matters in a democracy. We need a vigilant society as well as needing to shape our lives from the bottom up. What matters is diversity and not the feeling that we no longer have any influence over anything. I was in Taiwan in January and…

“The Berlin Wall has fallen. This is the end of Yalta. The end of Stalin’s heritage and the defeat of Nazi Germany.” The note was written on 9 November 1989 by Anatoly Chernyaev, international affairs advisor to the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Chernyaev had been a long-time employee of the international department of the Central…